In-Browser Video Editing Added to YouTube

Big news from YouTube about a hot new feature that allows users to edit videos from within their browser.

Among the tool's editing features are rotation, stabilization, brightness, contrast and temperature controls and adjustment of a video's start and end points. Also, there are an array of color effects that were created in a collaboration with another Google-owned digital media enterprise, Picnik.

This upgrade appears on video pages as a cleverly identified "Edit Video" button. Clicking the button brings up the editing tools, which are easy to operate by featuring simple sliders. It provides a window to display a preview, so you can watch your changes as you make them. It even takes a page out of it's big brother's book, offering its own "I'm Feeling Lucky" automatic color correction button.

Editing videos on YouTube that had already been uploaded used to be a pretty arduous and unpleasant task; they would have to be edited in outside software and then re-uploaded to the site, which erased all of the views, comments and links that it had already racked up.

Fortunately, this new editing feature does away with those issues, saving users both time and effort.

After one finishes editing his or her video, he or she simply saves it and then YouTube will being processing the changes. However, users still have the option of reverting back to the original in this time, just in case the edits aren't quite right.

There's also the option to save the edits as a new version of the video, unless you're a "popular video," which they define as being one with over 1000 views, or third-party content; in those cases, you can only save your edits as a new video, leaving the original version unaffected.

Within the industry, there is some scuttlebutt that these new features will eventually replace outside video editing software for "everyday users," although its hard to argue with native video editors like Apple iMovie or even Windows Movie Maker still offer more features and options than the current changes YouTube is launching.